“Here, I’ll take that.” Max handed the photo off to Helen, the sheriff’s secretary. “Scan this in,” he told her.
Then Max pulled a two-page report out of a file with Delilah’s name on the front. “Sariah, here’s the missing person report. You need to sign it so we can launch the Amber Alert.”
He handed her a pen. Sariah stared down at the paper, then over at me, searching my face. Her shoulders tense, her expression pained, I understood her fear. Never before had any of the sister-wives gone against my mother. But Sariah read the document, and then scrawled her signature across the bottom. “Now you’ll look for my Delilah?” she asked, her voice unsure but hopeful.
“Yes,” Max said. “Now everyone will look for her.”
“Send out the Amber Alert and the missing person report,” Max instructed Helen. “It’s all in the system. Everything’s ready.”
“It’ll be done in two minutes,” Helen said. “Mrs. Jefferies?”
Naomi responded as well, but Helen singled out Sariah. “I’ll say a prayer for your girl.”
“Thank you,” Sariah said. “You’re very kind.”
“Do we need anything else from them?” I asked Max. “I brought Naomi and Lily in case you have any questions about the flashlight. Do you want them to sign any kind of statement?”
“I don’t think so. Not at this point. This should do it.”
At the courthouse door, Sariah turned back to me. She reached out and wrapped her arms around me. “Bring my Delilah home, Clara. Please, bring her home.”
I wanted to respond, but I didn’t trust my voice. As they walked away, I pulled myself together, turned and headed back to find Max.
Moments later, we had our heads together over the computer at his desk.
“Clara, I’ve got the affidavit for the search warrant written, but something’s bothering me. How did you find out Evan Barstow has an identical flashlight? How did you get inside his house?”
I’d prepared for this question, one I anticipated I’d be asked. I needed to walk a thin line, not lie but not tell everything. “I was suspicious, and I wanted to see where Evan lived,” I said. “I pulled into the driveway and asked to use the phone. One of his wives, Jessica, invited me inside. While I was there, I saw the flashlight sitting out in the open on a countertop. Then, at the trailer, Lily showed me her flashlight, identical to the one taken when Delilah disappeared. It’s unusual, bigger than most, and the color, that bright, bright orange. I realized that it matched the one at the Barstow house.”
“That’s all that happened? You just walked up and asked Jessica to use the phone?” Max didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Clara, are you sure you didn’t do anything I should know about to convince her?”
“Nothing to worry about,” I said.
Max stared at me as doubtfully as if I’d just told him that I’d chopped the top off one of the mountains with a penknife. “Clara, you’re a cop. If Evan Barstow is behind all of this, if he does have Delilah, the other girls, if he killed that girl out in the field, you do understand that it’s a problem if you lie to get the warrant. Any evidence we find may not be admissible.”
“Everything on the warrant is true.” On the surface, I wasn’t lying. And at that moment, I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about a trial that could be a year or more away. I wasn’t concerned about what a judge might or might not rule. Time ticked away and I cared about one thing: saving Delilah.
The arrest warrant came together easily. Making the case against Evan Barstow stronger, it turned out that we didn’t just have the flashlight. While I’d been at the trailer, Max contacted the two families in the police reports I’d found in Alber’s secret files. The first didn’t help because the Bradshaws insisted the report on their daughter’s disappearance had been a mistake. The girl’s mother had told Max that Christina apparently did leave on her own. “Six months after they filed the report, they received a letter from her. In it, Christina said that she’d run away to Chicago with a boy and married him,” Max recounted.
The other family, however, the parents of the thirteen-year-old who’d filed a complaint, told Max that Evan was the man who harassed their daughter. For months, he watched her in the mornings as she walked to school. He trailed her in his squad car as she traveled home in the afternoons. Frightened, the girl’s mother began driving their daughter. The mother refused to let the girl leave the house alone. “They couldn’t file charges because Evan was the Alber police chief at the time. The officers refused to take them,” Max explained. “But the girl’s parents wrote down their complaint and turned it in. They wanted a record of what Evan was doing.”
Max attached a statement from the family with a copy of the original paperwork at the back of the search warrant.
Moments later, Max and I met with District Court Judge Alec Crockett in his chambers behind the courtroom. Ready to head home for supper, the judge had his black robe hanging on a coat rack. Well into his sixties, he looked like the grandpa next door in khakis and a green polo shirt. He didn’t appear to worry about breaking the law against smoking in a county building as he puffed on the scant remains of a Lucky Strike. “So this is a search warrant for the home of the former Alber police chief? He’s currently the chief in Hitchins, right?”
“Yes, your honor,” I said.
“And what you’ve got is…” He stopped talking and eyed the two of us while smashing the cigarette’s stub out in an overflowing ashtray.
“That Evan Barstow has a history of stalking young girls,” I recounted. “That Delilah Jefferies was abducted last Thursday evening. That Delilah’s orange flashlight disappeared at the same time she did, suggesting the kidnapper
